Homes, livelihoods at issue in Evansville noise ordinance debate

A dispute between Harbour's Edge neighborhood and KC's Marina Pointe is at the center of a proposed noise ordinance. How loud is the noise? We tested.
Noah Stubbs, Courier & Press

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To find OV Tiki Time tiki bar and grill, pull into the Marina Pointe lot as if you are visiting LST-325 and look for the Tiki Time sign. Follow the gangplank down to river level and you will arrive.(Photo: Aimee Blume / Courier & Press)Buy Photo

So it's not surprising the men who run KC's Marina Pointe and residents of nearby Harbour's Edge don't hear things or see things — anything, really — the same way. Depending on where you're standing, the riverfront restaurant and bar that packs in 1,500 people for live music on a good weekend and the mostly middle-aged, affluent residential community off Waterworks Road are just a few hundred feet apart.

Their year-long war of wills overlooking the Ohio River has each side taking late night decibel readings and pushing talking points in an increasingly frantic run-up to Monday's council vote.

But both know that no matter what the City Council does, they will still be there. It may be the only thing they agree on. To the men behind KC's, their fight is a neighborhood dispute — a solution looking for a problem. Harbour's Edge residents say it's just part of a citywide scourge.

The noise itself? Forget about it. The only thing both sides agree on is that the music rocks on until 3 a.m. on weekends.

"We went over to the neighborhood when (neighboring OV Tiki Time) was closed, and we had a live band -- and you couldn’t even hear it," said Chad Brady, general manager of KC's. "I took a police officer with us and a decibel reader, and we were fine. It was at 12:30 on a Friday night-Saturday morning. Nothing – just a little bit of bass."

KC's operator Kerry Chesser recalled another test when the establishment cranked up its music "so loud that it was shaking the whole building" and nothing but the bass was audible at Harbour's Edge. Tiki Time wasn't open then, either — all the better, Brady and Chesser said, to measure just how much of the noise is coming from their place.

Max Lingo called those assertions "ridiculous."

"Are you kidding? I can put a glass of water on the island in my bathroom and the top of the water vibrates from the bass. You can see the water ripple," said Lingo, who goes to bed at 10 p.m. even on weekends. "My next-door neighbor can’t hear his TV, OK?"

The distance from the restaurant bar's live performance area to Lingo's home is nearly 900 feet, or three football fields, according to Evansville-Vanderburgh Area Plan Commission data.

Pat Wathen, Lingo's next-door neighbor, said the music renders his and his wife's outdoor patio useless for socializing on weekend evenings. And yes, watching TV inside is harder.

"I was trying to watch the National Memorial Day concert. It was setting a nice mood, but I couldn’t stay in the mood because you can hear in the background – ‘thump thump thump thump thump thump thump,'" Wathen said.

When OV Tiki Time offers live music at the same time as KC's, Wathen said, the combination can create an intolerable din.

"Now you’ve got two different entities going at it, and even if you did enjoy it, you can't enjoy either one of them because they’re one over the other," he said.

KC's is trying to be a good neighbor without putting itself out of business, Brady and Chesser said.

The men said they can't do much to control how loudly live musicians play, but they can do something about how loudly the music emanates from the building. To that end, they spent $120,000 on sound-mitigating measures such as closing in a wall by the stage, pointing speakers inward and building a wall at the establishment's front end.

Lingo and Wathen scoffed at that, saying the volume is still nearly as loud as it was last summer. In those days, Wathen said, the sound created was "over the top."

Just how loud is it?

Granted access to Lingo and Wathen's properties late Saturday night, a Courier & Press team performed its own outdoor measurement of decibel levels using a sound level meter. Live music — singing, drums, bass, the voices of KC's customers — could be heard at 11:30 p.m., but the highest reading the newspaper received was just above 50 decibels.

A similar test a month ago rendered readings of near 60 decibels. There was no music at OV Tiki Time on Saturday night, but that establishment was offering live music on the previous occasion. Those tests were conducted at about 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday.

Neither would have violated the proposed noise ordinance or the current one.

The proposed ordinance states that from midnight to 7 a.m. on weekends, the sound level could not reach above 60 decibels on a neighbor's property – down from 75 decibels in the current ordinance.

Lingo and Wathen's reactions to the test indicated they aren't giving up the fight.

The band onstage at the time must make a "mild" form of music, they said. If the music was at this volume all the time it wouldn't be a problem, they said.

They said decibel reading apps on their cell phones rendered numbers as much as 20 points higher than those captured by the Courier & Press. They hinted that KC's might have put a clampdown on the volume of music Saturday in anticipation of the City Council vote fewer than 48 hours away.

But Wathen also acknowledged how inexact the practice of measuring sound levels can be with World War II warship LST 325 and a 170-foot marina channel nearby. And then there's the Ohio River. It is a point made by both sides.

The music seems to get louder as it gets later, he said, "but of course, I guess everything else is getting quieter."

"A lot of it’s atmospheric. As the night progresses and everything calms down weather-wise, the wind calms down," he said. "We’ve got the river there. Sound bounces off the river. There’s all kinds of things in that location that can affect the sound at one time or another."

The data

Noise complaints may be a citywide problem, according to data endorsed by the Evansville Police Department — but situations like this one are unique.

City police spokesman Sgt. Jason Cullum confirmed reports that the law enforcement agency received about 2,000 noise complaints last year. The police department doesn't enforce existing noise ordinances, a task that falls to the Evansville EPA. Police would join EPA in enforcing the proposed ordinance.

Fully 98 percent of the calls recorded by EPD were from neighbors complaining about noisy neighbors — not bars or nightclubs. Half of those calls were associated with apartment complexes.

A threat?

Chesser and Brady say they don't want to do it — but if the City Council passes the proposed new noise ordinance as presently constituted, they may have to move all or part of their operation a few yards south, just over the Kentucky line.

KC's leases its property from Inland Marina, which also owns the Kentucky property just behind KC's and across a parking lot. Right now that's just a field of debris, dirt and rocks. But Inland Marina said it is amenable to the move.

It's not meant as a bare-knuckles, do-or-die threat, Chesser said. It would be expensive. But it might be necessary to survive. A first violation brings a written warning, but subsequent fines within 12 months range from $50 to as much as $7,500 for a fifth violation.

Going through its landlord, Inland Marina, KC's paid a few dollars short of $11,000 in Vanderburgh County property taxes last year. That money goes to Vanderburgh County’s taxing units, such as libraries and schools. Some of it goes to city government, too.

There's also sales tax, alcohol tax, personal property taxes on equipment and supplies and food and beverage tax that wouldn't be getting paid in Vanderburgh County.

KC's also no longer could buy its beer from a local distributor. The Kentucky Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control confirmed that by that state's laws, retailers are required to purchase beer from licensed Kentucky wholesalers or distributors.

"That's not something that we really want to do," Chesser said. "We'll see."